Scanning film questions

[Nick De Marco]

Having recently got back into film I'm spending my nights scanning negs these days (joy)

I use Nikon Coolscan V for 35mm negs and VueScan 700 for my MF negs.

I would really appreciate some expert tips on settings, or links to rescources if anyone has them. In particular:

1. Generally I don't have a problem scanning black and white. I use maximum resolution settings on both. On the coolscan I recently have scanned the negs as colour and convert to b&w in photoshop as I'm told tis gives greater tonality. Is this correct?

2. Colour is a lot more difficult to get right at first. With the coolscan some film colours look very weird. I have tried fiddling with the slides in the tool box but it usually makes things worse. My best results seem to come from using the white balance tool on a particular part of the shot. How do you do colour?

3. Also with colour negs do is digital ICE a good thing? I prefer the results and hate spending hours getting rid of hidden dust specs. What do others think?

4. With the MF scanner, do you use film profiles? they seem a little hit and miss.

Thanks for reading and any advice appreciated.

Nick

 

[O. Pyykkö]

3. VueScan is your answer.

 

[mfogiel]

In B&W the main thing, is to make sure you do not clip any information, so use Vuescan, display the histogram, and make sure you only frame the image and no borders or spaces without film. If a negative is too dense, scan as transparency and invert in PS. Scan in 16bit B&W unless you use staining developers and want to get the best possible quality from that.

In colour, medium strength ICE is useful, and I have not noticed any sharpness degradation. For colour balance, if the ready profiles do not work well, either profile your films with appropriate software, or shoot a grey card in one frame, and set the colour balance manually.